Public schools increasingly use advertising to attract students

11/22/05 -- The marketing campaign began nearly two years ago with ads featuring a girl studying a butterfly with a magnifying glass. The ad’s message: “Discover Mounds View Public Schools.”

Since then, the Minneapolis suburban school district has attempted to “sell” itself through a variety of marketing strategies: a direct-mail campaign targeting families with preschool and private school children, ads in real estate guides, open houses, and a promotional video.

More competition

Why the hard sell? Competition. In Minnesota, parents can send their children to any public school in the state that has the space to accept them, and there is a wide selection of charter and private schools in the Twin Cities area. Many families have a score of options in addition to their neighborhood school.

It’s a highly competitive reality that the nearby Minnetonka school district takes very seriously, says Janet Swiecichow­ski, the district’s executive director for communications.

“It is a reality of our environment,” she says. “Parents do have choices . . . and we have a very discerning clientele. So school districts need to be looking at the needs of that clientele and making sure they have a program that’s meeting their needs -- and that they’re telling people about it.”

If Swiecichowski sounds a bit like a corporate marketing director, that’s not by accident. Across the nation, and particularly in states such as Arizona, Michigan, and Minnesota, school choice programs and the proliferation of charter schools have created an increasingly competitive education market.

And that’s forcing local school officials to change their way of doing business. More and more often, schools are finding it necessary to market themselves to families weighing their educational options, says Rich Bagin, executive director of the National School Public Relations Association.

“It isn’t everywhere, but [marketing] is growing,” he says. “There definitely is a trend  . . . of trying to lure people into their systems. It’s a lot more than there was even five years ago.”

In Minnetonka, where declining enrollment was a worrisome trend, school marketing was a means of financial stability. According to Swiecichowski, if the district had not boosted enrollment by 525 students in the past five years -- and thus raised more than $2.3 million a year in state aid -- ”we would have been talking about closing a school last spring.”

Before launching its marketing effort, Minnetonka school officials conducted market research to determine what parents in the region wanted from a school -- and what perceptions existed about the schools.

What officials learned was that, among parents of private school students, the public schools were not even a serious option, Swiecichowski says. Negative perceptions about public schools in general overshadowed the district’s high academic performance.

It was obvious that the district needed to make parents aware of the quality of the school system, she says. Thus was launched a public information campaign that included magazine ads, direct mail, cable programming, ads on movie screens, and an effort to share more “good news” story ideas with the local media.

High-impact ads

A similar effort in the Tempe (Ariz.) Elementary School District has proven equally effective. Despite competition created by charter schools and a statewide open enrollment law, the district serves 1,715 students from surrounding communities. That effort has brought in an additional $12.2 million in state aid over the last five years.

To do that, the district has a $400,000 budget for the school communications office, of which about $150,000 is available for marketing and advertising. That might seem to be a sizable sum, says Communications Director Gary Aungst, but it pales in comparison to the multimillion-dollar marketing budgets of local corporations.

Tempe has stretched its marketing dollars by relying on relatively low-cost, high-impact advertising strategies, such as those used in Mounds View and Minnetonka. The district also has focused on making sure staff members are upbeat and positive in their interactions with parents and community members.

“We put a big value on customer service,” Aungst says. “It’s a lot easier to keep a customer than to get a new one. So we need to show value to people.”

Over the years, the district has pushed a number of simple messages. Noting parental concerns about school safety, the district highlighted the fact that its schools are smaller than average and are nestled within residential neighborhoods. That led to such slogans as “Small Schools, Neighborhood Schools, Safe Schools” and “Come Be Part of Our Family.”

The district even has targeted marketing efforts to boost enrollment at specific schools, Aungst says. It promoted one new school by highlighting its traditional, back-to-basics educational philosophy.

When another school suffered a decline in enrollment, the district pitched the school as a child-focused environment with an ad showing a little girl and the motto: “At Curry, I am a child . . . not a number.”

“We did some market research and learned that in other [districts], people were dissatisfied with the educational product,” he says. “They felt kids were just a number, so we did a campaign around that.”

Not everyone is comfortable with this turn of events. Ted Blaesing, superintendent of Minnesota’s White Bear Lake Area Schools, worries that competition among school districts could erode the concept that public education is an institution that serves all children.

“If we’re going to have market-driven schools, then they all become private pretty soon,” he says. “They will move every which way into market niches, with specific programs aimed at subsets of students,” he says. “Lost in that debate is what the schools do for the common good.”

Another concern is how officials will react as other districts try to woo away their students. In Minnesota, for example, two small school districts are feuding because one district has said it will send a school bus into the other district to pick up students who opt to transfer to their schools.

Customer service

Competition also is encouraging school districts to focus more attention on customer service -- and the importance of addressing students’ and parents’ needs, says Charles Kyte, executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators.

School districts are experimenting with a number of new services, such as websites that allow parents to check student grades and homework assignments, language immersion programs, more day care services, and even school-cooked dinners that parents can pick up with their child at the end of a hectic day.

As an urban district surrounded by affluent suburbs, the Minneapolis school system confronts a particularly acute challenge in marketing its programs and schools. One of the district’s strategies is to market the multitude of educational options that a big-city school system can offer.

To that end, officials set up the Minneapolis Schools’ Choice Center, an online search engine that gives parents a starting point in their search for educational options in the city schools, says Jackie Turner, the district’s director of student placement.

“You, as a parent, can sit down and say, ‘I want this out of my child’s education. I want full-day kindergarten. I work, so I want a school that starts at 7:30 a.m. I want my child to receive violin lessons.’ You can check all the things you need, and the schools that meet the criteria come up.”

In Boston, the school committee just launched an initiative to strengthen communications to improve public involvement and support.

Competition from private schools and surrounding suburban school districts is one motive for this initiative, says Christopher Horan, the district’s chief communications officer. School officials believe there’s a need to change local perceptions about the quality of the city schools.

But school committee Chair Elizabeth Reilinger says another reason is that school districts come under a “fair degree of criticism” because they fail to adequately communicate with community stakeholders and help local residents learn how to get involved and make a difference in the education of their children.

Every major corporation knows the importance of investing in customer service and selling the quality of its products. “That’s something school systems have been very slow to wake up to,” Reilinger says.